MOSCOW. July 24 (Interfax) - Around 1.5 million people living in Crimea have already been given Russian passports, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Migration Service told Interfax on Thursday.
"The documents needed to issue Russian passports have already been accepted from more than 1.6 million residents of Crimea. Approximately 1.56 million passports have already been prepared. Of them, 1.45 million passports have already been distributed," the spokesman said.
Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky told Interfax at the end of June that the bulk of the work to issue Russian passports to residents of Crimea had been done.
Today Crimea has a population of around two million people.